The double bereavement and strain of her two years of life in Penfield left her for a long time bruised and sore.

Her relation with Stephen, as she looked back upon it, hurt her in every fibre of her nature.

Sometimes she was filled with remorse for the grief she had caused him, and sometimes with poignant distress, of doubt whether she had not after all been unjust to him.
Underlying all this remorse, all this doubt was a steadily growing consciousness that her love for him was in the very outset a mistake, an abnormal emotion, born of temporary and insufficient occasion, and therefore sure to have sooner or later proved too weak for the tests of life.

On the other hand, her thoughts of Parson Dorrance grew constantly warmer, tenderer, more assured.

His character, his love for her, his beautiful life, rose steadily higher and higher, and brighter and brighter on her horizon, as the lofty snow-clad peaks of a mountain land reveal themselves in all their grandeur to our vision only when we have journeyed away from their base.